Waiting
by Dayja
Summary: Legolas is injured and ill and alone as he waits for someone to come. He doesn't understand why no one comes.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer** : I do not own/make no money from/am not associated with _The Lord of the Rings_ or _The Hobbit_.

 **Warnings** : violence and non-graphic character death

 **The story**

Legolas awoke and wished he hadn't.

In his dreams, his mother sang to him and held him and he was loved. The waking world was cold, and silent and pain pulsed in his veins and radiated from his shoulder and from his hip and thigh.

He awoke and he whimpered because the waking world _hurt_.

He whimpered and he shivered and he reached his hand out for someone. His mother, the broken parts of his heart whispered, but he was awake now and he knew she wasn't there to reach for, and he searched for someone who was. His father. His brothers. Even his friends or a healer. Someone.

No hand reached back. No voice soothed him. Nor did any voice scold him.

Finally, he opened his eyes. They were heavy and didn't want to open, and his eyes didn't want to focus once he did manage. It was strange to open his eyes at all, for he didn't usually lay about with them closed, but they seemed to want to be closed just then.

It took a great deal of effort to make his eyes work properly, and doing so made the pain throbbing in his head worse, and the ache running up and down his arms and legs was worse as well, as though he had needles instead of blood in his veins, needles that burned.

He opened his eyes and he bit back whimpers, and he blinked away tears that only made it harder to see, and he turned his head to find who he knew must be there. Who was always there.

There was no one there.

There was a chair, but it was empty and undisturbed. His father was not sitting in a dream trance, waiting for his young son to awaken. His brother was not reading there. His other brother was not pacing about the floor. There was no one, nor any sign there ever had been. There wasn't even a healer. Not even a healer's apprentice. There was not another person in the room.

Legolas's thoughts felt slow, and he hurt and he was cold. He felt ill, and the world didn't make any sense at all. Someone should have been there. Someone always was.

His thoughts were slow, but the first explanation that finally occurred to him to explain his strange circumstances was a terrifying one that seemed to make the temperature of the room drop another degree, and the room already felt too cold for the elf.

They weren't there, he thought, because something has happened to them. Perhaps…perhaps they are all dead. He survived, and all his family died.

Perhaps everyone died. Perhaps every elf in the entire kingdom died and he was alone in this room.

His soft, pained whimpers turned to fearful sobs. There was no reason to bite back the sound anyway; there was no one there to hear him. He shook and he sobbed and in his heart he begged for someone to come, for his family to return and hold him and assure him they weren't injured or dead.

He cried, and he writhed from the pain inside him, and he shivered in the icy room, and he rolled onto his side and was almost sick on his own pillow but he had enough strength to lean over the side of the bed instead and be sick on the floor. The world spun and his blood burned while his skin froze and no one came with blankets or words of comfort or medicine or to assure him that all was well. No one came.

Legolas awoke.

He was still cold and he was still in pain and he was still alone. He was also thirsty. He hadn't remembered falling asleep and this time there was no dream of nana, only a sense of deep loss.

This time, his mind felt less sluggish, and alternatives presented themselves to him being alone because every other elf in existence was dead.

He was alone because he was no longer an elfling. Or at least (for he was not of age) he was not a baby elfling who needed his hand held and needed his ada to hold him and sing to him and needed his big brothers to check under his bed for monsters. He was old enough to be a warrior himself. Well, old enough to be an apprentice and to stand in a protected stance behind the warriors which was almost the same thing. He wasn't exactly an adult yet, but he was too old to be coddled.

He remembered what had happened to leave him in pain in a bed in the healing ward. There had been spiders, hundreds of spiders. There had been a battle in the forest. The elves were going to exterminate every last nest, they said, but somehow the nest they had gone to exterminate was larger than they had thought, than their scouts had suspected. There had been a hole in the ground, beneath the roots of an old dead tree, and the spiders had poured out and poured out and Legolas had been with the other young apprentices and they had brought new supplies from behind the defensive line and had helped the wounded away and there were so many wounded, so much screaming. The spiders screamed, the wounded screamed, or worse, didn't scream.

And Legolas hadn't disobeyed. He remembered wanting to. He wanted to help. He was young and only an apprentice but he was good with a bow, and bows are ranged weapons so he wouldn't have to enter into the midst of the battle, and he could have done more than to carry supplies of arrows to a more advanced apprentice who would carry them all the way into the battle itself.

But he hadn't, because Legolas wasn't one to disobey. He hadn't snuck into the battle; the battle had snuck in upon him. He had been helping a wounded warrior to stagger to the waiting healers when the spiders had appeared in their midst.

They had come from a hole that had appeared from nowhere. One moment Legolas was in a designated safe zone and the next it was war.

"Run!" the warrior had shouted, trying to push Legolas away, but there was no time, and anyway, Legolas was almost a warrior himself and warriors don't abandon wounded companions. He had arrows, because arrows were always in demand and he'd have passed them on to be taken to the warriors if he hadn't come upon the wounded elf first. He had a bow and his knives too, because elves are sensible and recognize the necessity of arming their young. So Legolas did what any warrior elf would have done in his situation; he planted himself in front of his wounded companion and he started shooting at the enemy.

He was young and inexperienced but his aim was deadly. The spiders were vicious and cruel and attacking where the elves seemed to be weakest, where they were all children and healers and wounded, and they were fast and they were many. Legolas shot eleven spiders. Seven of them died directly. Two ran away, sorely wounded. Two managed to deflect his arrows with their legs.

His knives were sharp but he was young and the spiders were fast and angry. Legolas remembers falling, tripping perhaps, and a shadow descending and his shoulder was in agony and he could hear his own voice screaming. He was screaming like a child, not like a warrior at all, but he couldn't seem to stop and then his leg was on fire and the world turned over and he looked and realized he was dangling from the jaws of a monster, and somehow he still had his knife, and even as he screamed, almost as though someone else guided his hands, his knife was in the spider's eye, and he fell, he remembered falling, but he couldn't remember landing.

And he woke up and he was in this room and he was alone. Spider venom still burned in his veins, and the puncture wounds throbbed, and when he dared to peek beneath his sheet (and why couldn't he have a blanket as well, it was so so cold) he saw bandages red with his blood, so red they were black at the center, or perhaps that was the spider's venom oozing out of him.

He had fought in a mighty battle, but he didn't feel strong or mighty or brave. And his father didn't come, perhaps because he was himself wounded (so many, so many were wounded), or perhaps he didn't come because he was king, and kings must look after their people, and there were many people now to look after. Or he didn't come because one of Legolas's brothers needed him worse. Or because he was dead. Because they were all dead.

Or perhaps they didn't come because they didn't want to come. Perhaps they didn't care much what had become of Legolas.

It was a secret fear, one he could normally recognize as unreasonable, when he wasn't ill and in pain and muddled and alone. It was the sort of fear that crept up in the darkest hours of the night. It was the sort of fear that intertwined itself into truer fears and true pains so that the true and untrue became harder to distinguish.

It was a fear he'd carried since his mother died. Since she had died and it was Legolas's fault.

It wasn't his fault. He knew that, logically. He was too small to fight the orcs, and she told him to stay where she put him, to stay no matter what he heard, no matter what he saw, and he was to stay there until she returned for him.

Sometimes, it felt like he was still waiting for her to come back.

He wasn't quite twenty years old. If he had been a Man, he'd have been big enough, old enough, but he was an elf and never had he felt so small and useless and his nana _screamed_. And Legolas was a good and obedient son and he stayed and he stayed and he _saw_ and he still stayed.

He didn't move when the orcs called for him. When they promised they'd let them all alone. When they promised they'd let his mother alone if he came out to play. He didn't move when she screamed and screamed and…and he closed his eyes, and maybe he was a coward because he closed his eyes but he couldn't close his ears.

He didn't move when the screaming stopped. Or when the orcs thrashed about, stabbing at the leafy undergrowth or whacking at trees, not even when he could smell their stink, smell blood, and the leaves around his hiding place rattled with their blows.

He didn't move when the orc's jeering and laughter turned to screams of pain and rage and fear, when death thundered down upon them. He didn't move when he saw his father find his mother and he screamed in anguish and he held her, and for a long time that was all his father did, and the forest was silent and still, and Legolas was still waiting because his mother was supposed to come and get him and she couldn't and somehow he couldn't move.

His father sat on the forest floor with his wife for the longest time, and then suddenly and all at once he looked away from her, looked around. Somehow his father found at once what the orcs could not and his eyes met his son's.

His father must have moved. He must have moved because he was an elf, not a spirit, and he could not instantly appear from one place to another, but Legolas didn't see the movement. One moment his father was weeping in anguish in the glade and the next Legolas was in his father's arms and the king held his son with all his strength, as though he meant to anchor him to the world somehow, as though he could keep the entire world at bay. He hid his son in his arms and whispered into his hair the same words, over and over, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

And from that moment the world was in two pieces, the world of Before and the world of After, and the pieces didn't fit together very well but somehow the world wasn't broken entirely and it did go on.

It was a world with less laughter and less music and less everything. It was a world of less. Legolas was still hugged, but not like he was loved so much as he was needed. Sometimes his father and his brothers just needed to touch him, it seemed, and when they didn't need him, they seemed to want him to be away from them because they'd look at him as though looking at him _hurt_. And those were the times when it was hardest to remember that it wasn't his fault that his mother died and that his family didn't hate him and he knew if he asked they'd tell him, but he never asked because he just knew, somehow, that asking that would hurt his family more than the comfort he'd get from them telling him they still loved him and it wasn't his fault.

And he became a warrior apprentice, as if knowing how to fight now would make any difference to then. He practiced and he practiced and sometimes, when he hit his mark again and again and again, the world felt more right. He wasn't an adult, but he wasn't a child, not anymore, and when the monsters came for his people, for his family, he could fight back.

Except he was still small, and not strong enough and not fast enough and he was hurt. Perhaps his father and his brothers were annoyed with how weak he still was and that was why they left him alone. Or perhaps they were injured too, somewhere else. Or perhaps they were dead.

Or perhaps those secret fears and secret thoughts were the true ones and he'd been tricking himself all this time and they hated him and would be glad if he died.

The fear and the doubt swam through him, as potent and as painful as the spider's venom, and he remembered his mother telling him to stay, to stay until she came, but she never came and she never came and not knowing was so much worse than anything.

The world swam about him and his limbs trembled but he managed to get his feet on the floor. The floor was cold, and he moved like a newborn colt, almost falling with every step while the floor seemed to tilt beneath him. Still, he was an elf and he was used to walking in tilting and moving surfaces and somehow he stumbled to the door and managed to open it.

He heard noises at last, and after the silence they were too loud, too much, like screaming. There were moans of pain, and soft singing, and the clank of implements rattling about, and soft voices, some soothing, some urgent, some desperate, some pained. He was close to the main healing ward, only steps away, but suddenly those steps seemed insurmountable.

"Ada?" he whispered, and with the sound of healing and suffering just feet away, suddenly the fear that his family was hurt or worse, that they were dead, all of them, was almost too great for him to bear. The world around him swayed, and he took a step and the pain in his thigh almost seemed to explode like he was being stabbed anew, and somehow the floor had turned into the wall and he tried to cling to it in case the world turned over again and left him falling, but there was nothing to hold.

"Prince Legolas!" someone's voice shouted. It sounded shocked and horrified and Legolas started to turn to see who was there and he hoped it wasn't nana because he had promised her he'd stay until she came and he had broken that promise and she must hate him, but before he could, the world went out of focus, and there was a noise like a waterfall in his ears and everything went away.

He did not hear the healer calling for aid.

He did not hear his father calling his name.

He did not hear his brother, his voice broken with pain.

He heard nothing but the roar of water rushing violently and then, over the water, his mother was calling for him. He was no longer alone. His mother had come for him at last.


	2. Chapter 2

Thranduil was with his son, his eldest, who was being, as his father said, needlessly stubborn.

"They're running low," his son said. "Others need it more. Just because I'm a prince doesn't mean I'm entitled before anyone else."

They were running low on anti-venom. The healers were reserving it for those who were most at risk; those with multiple stings or bites, or those elves who were frailer. Like the children. Children the same size as his youngest son who never should have been in danger. How their king had failed them.

"They do not offer it because you are a prince. You were stung three separate times."

"I am fine, father. I will live. Let them save it for a more dire case."

Yes, he would live. But he would have a rough time of it. Spider venom was not kind, and riding it out would mean pain, for hours, and fever, and in extreme cases it could lead to permanent damage to vital organs. That was unlikely in this case; his son had a high dose of venom but he was strong and healthy and he'd been bitten in the past, giving him some level of immunity.

As his king, Thranduil admired his self-sacrifice and bravery. As his father, he wept to see his son in pain. Internally, of course. He would not lessen his son's gift by making him feel guilty for it.

At least it was only one son who now lay infirm in a bed. He had a private room, one concession to his rank that the prince couldn't contest, not least because he was unconscious when they brought him in. His brother sat sleeping in a chair in an uncomfortable position that would likely leave him with a sore neck later, but he was exhausted and neither his brother nor his father moved to wake him. He had been the one to bear his wounded brother to the chamber and he had gone back out to help more wounded, for hours, before he'd been dismissed and allowed to see his elder brother again.

The king had duties as well that drew him away. He had to see the battle to the end, the horrible, misjudged battle that had been a mistake from beginning to end.

Thranduil was a good father who cared for his family. And his family was his children, but it was also his people and anyone under his care as king, which was the silvan elves but also the trees and the animals and it was the forest itself. The forest screamed for aid as it was beset by shadows, and its king responded. He sent his healers to cure the sickness, which in this case meant warriors to battle the darkness. And all who he sent to fight for him were his kin, but some few were actually _his_ , the children of his wife, and almost, almost he was glad that their mother was not there to watch her sons go forth into battle.

The spiders needed to be destroyed, or at least driven from his forest, from his family. They needed to be destroyed, but he made so many mistakes, too many, and he should have known better. He should have sensed the true depth of the nest they sought to destroy. He should have recognized the evil and unnatural intelligence in the spiders' actions. He should have known there would be tunnels. He should have known.

They won the battle, but the cost was high, much higher than he had anticipated, higher than any battle had cost them for a yeni, for a millennia. Twenty-eight dead so far. Such a tiny number to have such a devastating impact upon his kingdom. Twenty-eight immortal beings cut short. And only seven from among the fighting warriors. He had thought he'd been careful, that they'd planned well, that the healers, the _children_ he had allowed to pretend to be warriors while hiding back behind the lines, the wounded…they would be safe while the seasoned warriors destroyed the nest. The nest was supposed to be small, manageable, and the spiders stupid and quick to die.

Seven warriors died while bravely bringing down the dark menace of their forest. Eleven more died when they were meant to be safe, when the tunnel opened up and the spiders poured out where they weren't meant to be and leapt upon the wounded and unarmed. The spiders still didn't have it as easy as they might have wanted. Even wounded warriors can still fight, and apprentice warriors, children, had training if not experience, and healers are always ready to protect their charges with their lives. Eight healers did just that. And two children.

Twenty eight dead. So far. And over a hundred wounded. They were running out of anti-venom, and out of just about every healing supply held in store, and bandages.

Thranduil still didn't know where Legolas had gotten to. He knew he was not among the dead. Even if, somehow, no one had thought to tell the king that his own son had died, Thranduil himself had seen to the dead and his son was not there. Two children were, barely in their thirties, their smaller, weaker bodies unable to combat off the venom that an older elf might have survived.

How proud Legolas was to be an apprentice warrior, to be allowed to be a part of the attack on the spiders. His brothers had laughed, not cruelly but in the way adults tended to laugh at children who fancied themselves grown. Thranduil had not laughed. He could see the man in the child and it filled him with a horrible mixture of pride and dread.

This was his wife's child; the child who was only still with him because his mother protected him with her life. He was his wife's final gift, and his childish games and glee was the one bright song that still existed in his father's heart now that his wife was gone.

His sons were in pain, he knew that; all three of them were hurting and the youngest perhaps the most. Knowing that his children were in pain and not being able to cure it was almost more painful than the tear to his own soul with his wife's passing. And now his little green leaf, his small child who sang silly songs to birds and loved to climb and delighted in the stars and in snow and in every part of the earth as though each and everything were new and strange and wonderful…he had grown silent and songless and now he searched to no longer be a child at all and he would fight monsters.

It was painful to see the child struggle to be a man, and to know he was intent on throwing himself into danger. It was painful to feel as if he was letting his son down somehow, and not being able to help it. The boy's mother was dead, and his family could still see her in her son's eyes, hear her in her son's songs, and it hurt, and the boy seemed to know it hurt, and they couldn't stop from hurting each other. Why wouldn't the boy seek out danger, if he thought he caused everyone hurt?

Danger, it seemed, had found his son. Again. He knew he wasn't wounded, because he hadn't seen him being tended in the healing ward (and he had looked, every time he saw a small form in a bed he paused, and it was never him, but he couldn't help but look) and anyway, if his son were wounded (if he were dead) someone would have come and informed him. But his son wasn't there. Which meant he was likely injured in a different way, in his heart from seeing all the death and destruction around him. Again.

He was likely in a tree, in his favorite tree, high above the world. And now that the king finally had time to himself, time to be a father and not a king, and he had seen his wounded son and he had seen his other son, heart wounded and exhausted but uninjured, now he could seek out his little leaf and bring him in. Still, he hesitated. If ever there was a time he missed having a partner, it was times like this, for if he could he would split himself in two so that all his children could be seen to at once.

His son, in pain and fevered and half asleep, somehow noticed his father looking at the door and knew what he thought.

"Go," he whispered. "I have El to keep me company."

Thranduil opened the door.

And found his youngest son sprawled upon the ground, his torso wrapped in bloody bandages and his body shaking and spasming in a sort of fit while three different healers surrounded him, calling for anti-venom and bandages and the king.

It would be days later that the king would understand exactly how this had happened; how his son could be so horribly injured and then left alone for hours and hours. It happened by accident, of course, and that was almost worse, because there was no one for the king to rail against or blame.

He should have been told his son was injured. No one wants to tell a father their young son was gravely hurt, though, and those who knew put it on each other, and the elf who had carried his son into the stronghold, refusing to put him down or relinquish him to any other until he'd laid him on his bed, had been badly injured himself. Once he'd left the prince to the care of a healer, he allowed himself to be taken to a free bed and had passed out.

The healer had dressed the prince's wounds, then gone out for a second dose of the anti-venom. The entire healing ward was in chaos. They had stuck everyone in the large wards, because most all cases were dire and it was easier to see to everyone together than have some tucked away in quieter rooms. In the chaos, the healer managed to get injured himself. He was already exuasted from being afield and tending to patients for hours, and he slipped on someone's blood and managed to sprain his arm and knock his head.

The other healers set him up in a corner with a glass of wine, because there were no painkillers to spare, and the healer had asked after the prince, had asked if anyone was seeing to him, had demanded that they see to him in his private room.

By unfortunate timing, the elder prince had just been brought in. Everyone was exhausted, the ward was in chaos, and no one thought he could mean the younger prince. The healer was assured the prince was seen to (no one dared admit the prince had refused the anti-venom, the healer was already worked up and he clearly needed some rest and healing himself).

If the elder prince had been taken, by chance, into the same room as the younger, the mistake would have been swiftly rectified. By equal chance, he was taken into the room next door. All such rooms were magically sound proofed. No one heard the young prince moaning, or sobbing, or screaming. No one knew he was there.

All they knew was that suddenly their young prince was fitting on the floor, his small body overcome by spider venom and blood loss. He was not even thirty years old yet, one of the youngest of the apprentice warriors, his body too small, too young. Children were more apt to die of the venom then the older warriors, hadn't the two children already lying dead proven that? And they were older than Legolas, larger.

He was so small in the king's arms when he grabbed his son and held him. He held him with all his strength, just as he had those few years before, when he held him after his mother left them behind. Thranduil held his son as though in holding him he could anchor him to the world, but that isn't how life works.

The call for anti-venom went all up and down the wards, and the answer that came back from all corners was the same: we're out.

Thranduil would kick himself later for not saying it immediately, but the shock of finding his baby child half dead on the floor had almost overcome his senses and he barely understood that there were healers around them let alone what the healers were shouting for. In fact, he might not have understood at all, if the door to his elder's room hadn't been left ajar and his eldest understood and acted.

"Here, anti-venom is here," he rasped from the doorway. He shouldn't have been out of bed himself, but Thranduil wasn't about to scold him, not this time, not when he held salvation in his hands for the child dying in his father's arms.

A second bed was brought into the room so they could move from the hallway. Thranduil carried his child to it, only reluctantly allowing him to be pulled from his arms. The child's brothers joined him at the bedside, his second son awakened by the commotion, and now he helped to prop up his elder brother who could only be convinced to sit upon his own bed rather than lying down again. Thranduil might have insisted he do as the healers said, except all his attention centered upon the activity around Legolas.

He'd be told later, about how brave his little son truly was. How he saved a grown warriors life. How he saved his own life, fighting to the end.

Thranduil would rather have a coward for a son, than a dead hero, but he never said that out loud, and certainly never suggested he was less than completely proud of the young warrior his child was becoming. And he was proud. But he needed his son to live.

He needed his son to live. His family was already fractured, and if they lost their youngest…if they lost the child that his mother had died so as to return him to them, if they lost her final gift to them…they were all lost.

The healers rebandaged the wounds, and they were horrible and hideous wounds that did not belong on a child, and after they had applied what little medicine remained, and cleaned him, then they allowed the king to take his son into his arms again and he held him and while they chanted healing words over him, he held him, and when he stopped breathing, he held him, and when he coughed and breathed anew, he held him, and then he sang.

It had been years since he'd sung. His wife had left, and his family had broken, and the darkness over the forest had spread, and there had been no songs left in him, but he sung now.

He sung, and he held his son, and his sons held him in turn.

Legolas breathed in. And out. His heart stuttered, but it beat, and continued to beat.

Time has little meaning in vigils such as this, and none could say how long it lasted. No one intruded, outside of a healer occasionally checking in on them or offering new medicine, to either injured prince. No one came to suggest they really needed their king in this moment, for there was not an elf among them who didn't believe their king to be exactly where he was needed most.

A long time passed. That is all that Thranduil knew. Perhaps hours. Perhaps a yeni. A long time, while his son lay dying in his arms, but somehow still wasn't dead.

And after that long time, Legolas opened his eyes. He was still in pain. His body ached deeply, and his shoulder and hip throbbed. He wasn't cold though. And he wasn't alone.

"Nana came for me," he said, his voice week but clear. "I waited and waited, and she came for me. Like she promised. But she sent me back. Are you…are you glad?"

"So glad," Thranduil whispered in return. "More than you can possibly know."

It was not a quick recovery, and nor was it painless, but Legolas had is father to hold him when everything hurt, and he had his brothers to tell him stories, and they sang to him. Legolas mended and, it seemed to him, that his family mended a little bit too.

He wasn't waiting anymore. He'd found what he'd been searching for, and it was all around him and it was endless and it was strong.


End file.
